


Green-Eyed Quarian

by AFTanith



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/F, F/F Pining, F/M, Female Shepard/Tali'Zorah nar Rayya Pining, Jealousy, Love Triangle, Possibly Pre-Poly, UST
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-20
Updated: 2016-10-20
Packaged: 2018-08-23 16:33:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8334553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AFTanith/pseuds/AFTanith
Summary: Tali sits alone in the dark, unable to calm her mind enough for sleep. Her thoughts are racing, preoccupied by what she fears (hopes?) might be going on just one deck above her.





	

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt was "jealous". I wrote about envy instead (and still called it jealousy). Oh, well.

Tali sits alone in the dark, unable to calm her mind enough for sleep. Her thoughts are racing, preoccupied by what she fears (hopes?) might be going on just one deck above her. She's been watching the way Garrus and Shepard have started dancing around each other in a way they never have before. (Sure, Shepard's always had an obvious thing for turians, but Tali never thought Garrus would reciprocate!) And... it's strange, how much it's bothering her.

Shepard is undeniably her best friend in the universe at this point, the person who's fought for her beyond anything Tali could've ever expected. Shepard is the one who cleared her name and preserved her place in the Fleet, the one who always seems to show up just in time to save her life, the one person she feels so close to that she almost wishes--

Tali shakes her head, trying to rearrange her scattered thoughts into something she can understand. She's... well, she's been noticing Garrus lately. A part of her wants to blame _Fleet and Flotilla_ for that (and there's a quieter part of her that wants to blame Shepard's own sexual proclivities), but it's there and she can't deny it. She hasn't thought much about it because it seems so impractical; surely it would make more sense to nurture her affection for someone like Kal'Reegar or Veetor'Nar. But Garrus has caught her eye... or he had, until this thing with Shepard happened.

And now these ridiculous feelings have grown even more distorted and confused. She'd thought, at first, that it had been jealousy. Or shame, even. How could she have thought to harbor feelings of her own for Garrus, after all, when it had been so painfully inevitable that Garrus and Shepard would gravitate together?

But the more Tali thinks about it, the more she's convinced that this isn't about her jealousy over Shepard getting to be with Garrus. It seems so strange, so foreign to everything she thought she knew about herself, but after days of considering and reconsidering what in the galaxy is going on in her head... she thinks it's actually Shepard.

No matter what she feels for the turian (and that will take much more puzzling before she comes close to figuring it out), Tali isn't jealous because Shepard gets to be with Garrus.

Instead, Tali is jealous because the turian got to Shepard first.

**Author's Note:**

> [Prompt me.](http://aftanith-writes.tumblr.com/submit)


End file.
